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My new research project is about to start (once a Research Assistant joins me: see job ad here). I have become very interested lately in what can constitute the principles of a critical data literacy that is central for citizen engagement. Big data are everywhere, and they are transforming the way we live. But making sense of data and communicating in ways that are relevant to broad audiences and for the social good requires the skills and literacy to access, analyse and interpret them. My new University of Brighton research project addresses the need to develop practices that allow citizens to work with data, to make data more relevant and appealing to communities, and enable their engagement in policy debates. Instead then of focusing on enhancing data analysis and technical skills, I am interested to explore how a combination of creative media, storytelling and analytics allows participants to generate debates around specific issues that affect their communities.

I will be working with community organisations in the Brighton area, running a Datahub workshop focusing on sexuality/gender as they play out with other social issues, such as poverty, unemployment and housing. For updates see https://criticaldataliteracy.com.

The Research and Enterprise Excellence Awards are a celebration of success across the research and enterprise community at the University of Brighton.

For the 2016/2017 awards, nominations were invited to recognise the achievements of colleagues who have produced a body of work that has demonstrated significant impact or engagement within the last twelve months. The judging panel comprised the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise), the Directors of Research and Development and the Director of Research, Enterprise and Social Partnerships. Awards were presented at the inaugural Research and Enterprise Conference on Monday 5 June 2017.

For those too busy to read the entire book, here is an interview I gave to the Centre for Communication & Social Change at the University of Queensland. It’s called, well, feminist activism and the digital, and I talk about the motivations, the challenges, and the key premises of the book.

I also taked to Chris about how I am thinking about the moral economy of data sharing and how we perform ‘good citizenship’ with self-tracking technologies, which I have written about in a fantastic new book (more info to follow soon). And of course we talked about my research on fertility apps, which is also a forthcoming publication.

The podcast series has been hosting very influential scholars who think critically about digital health, so it is really worth listening to if you are interested in the field.

So I thought that talking about feminism in this Research Seminar now was important. Feminist and queer activism are constantly shifting and changing as the identities that are associated with them change, but it is in this historical and sociopolitical conjunction that feminism seems more relevant than ever to people, to their everyday lives and struggles in a very bleak world. In the last few months, we have witnessed how feminism just ‘clicked’ – millions of people recently marched around the world against Trump’s misogyny and right-wing populism, and digital culture has been thriving with feminist memes, hashtags and other forms of participatory media that has given many of us hope about the future of bottom-up organizing. It is the first time after many years that feminist issues are the central issues in cultural and political life, and not just the preoccupations of feminist. The first time in years of feminist backlash when we are not operating within an assumption that feminism has met its aims and is a matter of the past; it clearly has not.But as feminist cultural production flourishes in the streets and online, so does hate speech, cyberbullying and online misogyny. I showed the audience of the talk the top results that my search of the word ‘feminism’ returned on YouTube on Monday. YouTube is populated with Feminist Cringe, a supposedly comedy genre that ridicules feminists who are articulating any kind of counter-discourse to the misogyny in the media and in protests. The hate speech that the comments attract is appalling and worrying, and it begs the question: are we taking one step forward and two stps backwards?

But do these comments really matter, you may ask? Can this kind of online anonymous, and perceived as intangible hate speech really hurt a movement that is physically present in the streets? How much power do social media actually have? I think they do – and in what followed in my speech I tried to unravel how I think about the complex dynamics of content production and control that constitute online networks as contradictory spaces of both vulnerability and empowerment for feminist and queer politics. In this long talk, I visited some of the key concept in my new book. A key theoretical concept that I introduce is that of biodigital vulnerability. My argument is that corporeal vulnerability, and the new forms of governmentality that appear due to technoscientific acceleration, when made public can have great political potential and can be empowering for communities and individuals that have been marginalised or victimised due to sexuality or gender.

Through a discussion of the development of the concept of biodigital vulnerability and a key investigation of the different temporalities of digital media and everyday activism, in this talk I revisited the central themes of the book: labour, embodiment, affect, practices and materiality.

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About

I’m AHRC Leadership Fellow/UKRI Innovation Fellow, PI in the project ART/DATA/HEALTH and Principal Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Brighton, UK. My research interests focus on digital culture, emerging technologies and social change. I am the author of the book Feminist activism and Digital networks: between empowerment and vulnerability (Palgrave MacMillan 2017), and am currently writing a book with the title Feminist Data Studies: big data, critique and social justice, which will be published by Sage in 2020.